


Imaginary Friend

by PerfectlyGenericItem



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Lup (The Adventure Zone) Lives, Lup (The Adventure Zone) is there and she can say fuck, because she's a lich and all, but she's there, there's a lot of stuff she can't say but fuck is not one of them, well she doesn't live
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-19
Updated: 2018-03-19
Packaged: 2019-03-31 04:05:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13966962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PerfectlyGenericItem/pseuds/PerfectlyGenericItem
Summary: Lup is freed from the Umbra staff two years earlier than in canon. She seeks out her family, and is confused when they appear to be split up. She finds Taako first, and is overjoyed and expects him to feel the same. There's just one problem: he can't remember her. More than that, he can't see her.





	Imaginary Friend

 

It wasn’t a sudden awakening. Lup drifted between conscious and unconscious for an eternity, unaware of where she was, unaware of the time passing outside the cave her skeleton lay. She’d have brief alert periods, where she’d be confused by the room she found herself in and the curtains that formed the walls. Upon trying to leave the room, she’d draw back a curtain and just see more of the expanse – blank floors and dark curtains. Later, she’d connect the curtains’ colour to that of her Umbra staff, when she finally awoke for good, but for now, she always woke disoriented and unable to remember how, exactly, she got here.

She started trying to stay awake. A short while after she’d come to, she’d experience a wave of exhaustion that almost always brought her back down. But now that she’d experienced it multiple times, it came less frequently and was weaker. Lup could finally stay awake for more than what felt, to her, like five minutes. She didn’t bother with trying to find a way out – as far as she knew, it was impossible. Now, fully awake, all she did was try to remember how, exactly, she got here.

The memories came in flashes. Loud and confusing, to start, but then she could make sense of the noises. She remembered the dagger that Cyrus Rockseeker carried, slashing across her back. A hurried thunder wave sent him flying into the vault door, and she closed it as he jammed the gauntlet – her gauntlet – over his wrist. She remembered dying, a feeling she was too familiar with. She remembered watching the Umbra staff her dead body held twitching, opening, inverting, and realising too late that she was its target. The dark violet curtains around her now made more sense – they were the colour of her umbrella.

Then she remembered leaving the Starblaster, and a pang of worry shot through her chest. That note she’d left – all she’d written was “back soon”. She jumped up and cried out, “Shit, Taako and Barry!” The sound surprised her – for so long it had been silent. “God, why did I leave that note? Why didn’t I tell them?” She had a habit of talking to herself when she was alone. “Past me was an idiot.”

If the inside of the umbrella was anything, it was _boring_. Lup began vocalising her internal monologue just to _hear_ something. “I wonder what the others are doing? I wonder if Taako and Barry stopped looking for me. No, that sounds wrong. I'm sure it hasn't been that long.” Lup sighed and started shooting flames at the curtains. They caught, but they didn't burn, leaving a flame flickering on that small portion of fabric. Lup closed her fist and the flame extinguished, leaving no mark on the curtain.

This was what she did to entertain herself. Spell slots didn't seem to exist; she could cast flames at will whenever she wanted it. At one point, she counted how many times she could cast it – she got to four hundred and thirty-two flames created and extinguished before she grew bored and stopped. They never left any mark – this room seemed to be unchangeable.

Eventually, even this bored Lup. She was spread-eagle on the ground, waving her hand to cast spells. “Fire, gone. Fire, gone. Fire, gone. Holy fucking shit, this is so boring.” She sat up and put her head in her hands. “Fuck. I just... I just want to know what's going on out there. I just want to be able to hear something other than me!”

That thought gave her pause. “Wait. _Can_ I do that?” Honestly, she'd never tried. She just assumed it would be the same as the inside of the umbrella – boring, with only the distant echoes of waves. But now that it had been... Lup still had no idea of the time that had passed. It felt like it had been a year, thinking back on it, but maybe time passed differently inside the staff. Maybe she'd been asleep for six years before awakening, or maybe it had been an hour.

Lup decided to try. Her ears pricked up as she shut her eyes and sat cross-legged on the ground. It looked like she was meditating – she kind of was. She started thinking about what was out there – or what she could remember, anyway. A vault door, closed with no handles or locks in sight. A sharp drop near the mouth of the cave, into an inky blackness that looked like it might go on forever. And her corpse, in its red robe, slumped up against the cave wall, with an umbrella laid on top of it.

Suddenly, there came a rushing sound in Lup's ears. Like the flow of air, which didn't exist inside the staff, had started up again. Startled, she fell backwards, lost concentration, and the sounds stopped. Lup groaned and started laughing. “H... Holy shit... I fucking did it!”

She tried again. This time, she expected the noise, and didn't jolt as much as a result. _Eyes shut, legs crossed, think about out there…_

Over the next… however long – “Time doesn’t fucking exist anymore, Lup, don’t bother.” – Lup began to figure out how to do it at will. After a while she could do it standing, and then she could do it with her eyes open, and then she didn’t even have to think about it. It was like a radio station – when you’re first tuning it, it takes a while to find the frequency, but the more you find it, the better you remember it until you can change to the station without even thinking.

And then she stopped listening. It was just so _boring_. Nothing but waves and the sounds of whatever creatures lived inside the mines. Her existence inside her prison was boring anyway but being able to hear the outside world without being able to see it was a bit depressing. She’d still listen occasionally, but it didn’t seem worth her time.

By divine providence, or pure coincidence, Lup wasn’t sure, but she was so grateful she decided to listen. It wasn’t a day that stood out to her, and there was nothing that caught her attention, but Lup was listening to the waves and the sounds of slimes when she heard, “…Combat?”

It was distant, much like the echoes of waves, and infrequent, and Lup thought maybe she’d imagined it. But then she heard it again – a grunt, a sword slashing into jelly, the vocalisation of a spell. Then footsteps. Still far away but coming closer. “I wonder if people out there can hear me?” Lup asked herself.

It took a while, and no matter how much time Lup had spent in this blasted staff, she was an impatient person. She paced throughout her chamber, excited that maybe, whoever these people were, they would get her _out_ of there. And then she could hear voices, and they weren’t familiar, but her heart still swelled and ached – it had been _so long_ since she’d heard anyone but herself.

Eventually, the sounds were close enough that Lup knew they were in the same room as her. “HEY!” she shouted. “Hey! Can you guys help me out! Just break the… break the umbrella! Please?”

“So where’s this treasure supposed to be?” a female voice asked, either not hearing or not acknowledging Lup’s screams.

“The vault over there, you idiot,” the other voice, also female, replied.

Lup tried again. “Hey! Are you ignoring me? Please help me get out of here!”

“Do we have the key for the vault?” the first voice asked.

“Holy fuck, Lora, were you just not listening to me?” the second snapped. “I have a key, _of sorts_. It’s this blood, here, dwarf blood from one of the sons of the guy who owned this place.”

“Grisly. Gross.” Lora made a disgusted noise.

“ _You’re a warlock,_ Lora,” the second voice grumbled.

“Still yucky, Esh. Blood is gr–” Lora suddenly stopped talking. “Hey, uh, what is that?”

“What?” Esh paused. “Oh, _that._ Uh, it looks like a skeleton, Lor.”

“A… skeleton? How fucking long have I been dead?”

“What’s it _holding_? There, under its arm?” More shuffling, presumably Lora moving closer to Lup’s corpse.

“It looks like a cane.” Esh’s voice also sounded closer to the umbrella. Then Lup felt something brush… somewhere. She hadn’t felt touch in a _while_ , and it startled her. Unwittingly, she released a blast of force that was audible both inside and outside the staff.

There came a whooshing noise, and then a loud clanking thud as, Lup assumed, Esh went flying into the wall on the other side of the cave. “Oops,” Lup blushed, continuing to listen.

“Esh, you good?” Lora asked.

There was a loud groan, and then Esh spoke. “Fuck me, that hurt.”

Lup heard Lora move even closer to the staff. “It’s not a cane, dude, it’s an umbrella.” Then she chuckled. “And it just threw you across the fucking _room_!”

“That wasn’t the fucking umbrella, Lor.” Lup heard the shifting of metal plates as, presumably, Esh stood up. “There’s something in there. I felt something… scream.”

“Do… do you think it’s evil?”

“I mean, it doesn’t seem fucking good, does it?” Esh cursed again. “Thank Ohgma I was wearing a helmet.”

“So what do you think we should do?”

“I think there’s a spirit bound to it, Lora. We should destroy it.”

“It seems so cool though!” The hairs on Lup’s neck stood up, and her instincts told her that that meant something was about to touch the staff again. She held her breath in preparation.

“Don’t fucking touch it, Lora. It could… I don’t know. You’re a warlock, it could possess you or something!”

“That’s… not how warlocks or spirits work, Esh.”

“I don’t fucking care, I’m destroying it.”

“Wait, don’t –”

The last thing Lup heard was a long swish followed by a resounding, ear-splitting crack. It was the sound of a snapping pencil, except it echoed inside the Umbra staff and outside in the cave and even in Lup’s own head. She shut off her outside senses to try to abate some of the pain the loud noise was causing, but it didn’t help. It felt like her ear drums were splintering, which was stupid, because she didn’t have a physical body, which meant she had no ear drums. Lup fell to her knees on the floor of the chamber, and her vision turned black.

At first, she thought she was dying. For good. It was that rushing tunnel sensation that everyone always talked about. There was even a white pinprick at the end, which she was quickly ascending towards. It got larger, and larger, until it filled her vision and was all she could see.

But then, instead of feeling cold, or whatever death was supposed to feel like, Lup felt a rush of power, not unlike what she normally got when she died and ascended into her lich form. Fire licked across her skeletal palms and purple lightning flashed across the hem of her red robe. The sounds of the outside were back, except she wasn’t putting in any effort to hear them. The snapping sound was gone, and so was the pain. All Lup could hear was the soft echoing waves, the chirping of bats and other cave animals, and a crazed, malicious laughter.

She realised – the laugh was hers. It was echoing in that way she knew a lich’s voice did when they were losing control – it sounded like there were three of her talking (or, rather, laughing) at the same time.

Lup was losing her cool. She knew she had only seconds before her magic essence eveloped her soul whole and she’d be gone, whatever remained a crazed husk that would eventually be killed. She was practised in bringing herself down, but she was still wracked with nervousness every time she did. As flames and lightning and laughter bounced around the cavern, Lup filled her mind with images of Taako and Barry, and the days they gave her. She always thought of Barry’s first – the song he wrote her, the lazy walk down the beach, the water breathing spell cast as they went beneath the waves and walked through a coral forest where Barry showed her an evocation spell he’d learned to burn her name into the sea floor. Then she thought of Taako’s day – the breakfast, the water gun fight with Davenport, destroying the DMV. Even now, the memories made her smile.

She felt the flames slow, the lightning stop, and her laugh stopped echoing. She drew her hands back in and lowered to the ground. She looked around the cave, and _good lord,_ it was such a great feeling, seeing something other than the curtains around her. There was another thing, too, a feeling of size. Inside the Umbra staff, she’d felt so small, probably because comparatively, she had been. But now, she felt gigantic. It made her feel more powerful, and that surge of power was probably why she lost control when she was free.

Lup sucked in a long breath. She didn’t need to breathe, being undead and everything, but it had been so long since she’d been outside of that staff. The air was damp and smelled like death. It was wonderful.

“Wait, where…” She remembered there were people who actually freed her from the staff. She whirled around, and was greeted by the horrible sight of why the air smelled like death. There were two charred bodies right next to the snapped, burned remains of the umbrella. One of them was human-sized, and wearing a set of heavy metal armour – Esh, she remembered their name was. The other was clearly wearing cloth, as there were blackened scraps over the corpse. Lup remembered that corpse to be Lora’s.

“Uh, look guys. Thanks for freeing me from my fucking… umbrella vore prison, I guess. Sorry I, uh, lich-ed out on you and burned you to death, that’s not cool of me.” She went to leave, and then remembered the vault – she should check on the gauntlet. “Oh. Uh, unless you were bad guys. Then, you know, fuck you, I guess, and I’m glad I killed you.”

“The incorporeability that comes with being a lich sure is helpful,” Lup said aloud as she phased through the vault door without much of a problem. The scene inside the vault was exactly what she wanted to see: nothing but black glass, with a skeleton in the centre. The gauntlet was on his hand, aimed at the door. Lup sighed with relief. “Holy shit. I did it.”

The vault didn’t sound as secure as Cyrus had said it was, though. It seemed like if someone got their hands on Rockseeker blood, they could just open it. “Were you just fucking… trying to get the gauntlet off me? Wow bro. Longplay. Mad respect. Also, fuck you.” If Lup had a physical form right now, she’d spit on the skeleton. As it was, she couldn’t do that, so she just settled for flipping him off with both hands as she floated backwards out of the vault. Nobody could have seen it, but it made her feel good.

Lora and Esh did a great job of clearing out the cave. Lup didn’t encounter a single monster while she was travelling out. It wouldn’t really have been much of a problem if she did, but it was a lot faster. She reached the mouth of the cave within fifteen minutes.

“Holy shit, there’s a breeze!” Lup hadn’t felt the breeze in… “Fuck, I still don’t know how long it’s been. At least the Hunger hasn’t swallowed up the plane, I guess.” She smiled and stretched, for a moment just surveying the view the cave gave her. It was midday, and she could see the town of Phandalin bustling (or, as much as a small town could bustle). Over in the distance, she could just make out the Teeth, the mountain range separating Rockport and Neverwinter. Smoke was rising from one of the peaks – a dragon, maybe? “Ooh, that’d be fun to go kill.”

But first, she knew what she had to do – find her family.


End file.
